Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a technology used for transporting Fiber Channel (FC) frames over Ethernet, which is currently being standardized at the Technical Committee for Fiber Channel (T11) of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS). FCoE technology enables users to establish a unified network infrastructure for data centers based on Ethernet. The capability to transport FC data on top of an Ethernet network alleviates the problem of maintaining a separate storage area network (SAN) and Ethernet network. As a result, instituting a single, converged network reduces the complexity, space, and cost necessary to maintain the network infrastructure.
The FCoE technology replaces the FC physical (FC-0) and FC coding (FC-1) layers of the FC architecture with the Ethernet physical and Media Access Control (MAC) layers of the Ethernet architecture without altering the FC framing (FC-2) layer and higher layers. Using the FCoE technology, the FC frames and standard Ethernet frames can be transported independently in the network. Accordingly, the FC frames are mapped over Ethernet frames and then transmitted on Ethernet links, and thus provides substantially seamless integration between FC based networks and Ethernet based networks.